CALEPINUS, Ambrosius.

Finely bound, very good copy of the first edition of this scarce, abridged version, in no less than nine languages, of the most influential early modern polyglot dictionary. This is variant A, with the imprint ‘in Bibliopolo’ (Jones, ‘German Lexicography’, 261). Ambrogio Calepino (1440-1510) was an Italian lexicographer renowned for his Latin dictionary of 1502; known as ‘il Calepino’, it was reprinted dozens of times in the course of the C16. Despite the changed ‘intellectual climate’ beginning from the second half of the C16, ‘with vernacular languages throughout Europe conspiring to defeat the humanists’ project and make classical Latin an irredeemably foreign language to all, Calepino’s dictionary became the main translation dictionary in use’ (Moss, ‘Renaissance Truth’, 24), especially thanks to the subsequent enlargements by sundry European scholars, which turned it into a polyglot dictionary featuring up to 13 languages.3 This 1654 Leiden edition included additions by Jean Passerat (1534-1602), the successor of Ramus to the professorship of Latin at the Collège de France, and was edited by Cornelis Schrevel (1608-64), professor at Leiden and author of a Latin-Greek lexicon. Extremely successful thanks to its portable format, it features definitions in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Italian, German, Spanish, English and Flemish. The preface remarks indeed that ‘the weight of the original work, and the crowding of the numerous examples, had become very confusing, and made reading tedious’. In layout, format and content, Schrevel’s edition made it a more useable instrument for private study. A solid reference work in a handsome binding.